The Pattern #221: What a ₹5 UPI fee does to loan repayment
Can the MDR on UPI hurt lender revenues?
Mayank Jain
Every price tells a story. Not every story is inflation.
The RBI held rates at 5.25% this week. The number was expected — the reasoning is what's worth reading. Prices are rising, but only in food and fuel, and the RBI is waiting to see if it spreads before acting. It's the same call a lender makes when a borrower has a bad month.
When experience becomes infrastructure.
Can experience be shared? From deposit pricing to digital KYC, two regulatory changes show how hard-earned judgment is becoming reusable infrastructure for financial institutions.
Banks are buying tools for a problem tools can't fix
Banks are arming up against AI-led attacks with 25 vendor partnerships and a new SBI-led framework. But the research published this month points at three gaps none of that reaches — and all three are about how a bank operates, not what it buys.
RBI guidelines
The RBI just made "source of truth" a regulatory requirement
Ask your credit team what a borrower owes today. Then ask your collections team. If the answers don't match, this week's RBI proposals are about you.
Foreign banks are giving up on the part of India they were built to win.
The affluent segment is the part of Indian retail a global bank should find easiest to win.
The FM just held a meeting that should worry every lender in India
Welcome to the 201st edition of The Pattern, a weekly newsletter on the latest in finance, technology, and
Four years later, an industry reshaped
Five themes ran through nearly every edition we published over these four years. We're naming them plainly -- and saying what each one actually meant.
Two MPCs, same number, different story
A pause from constraint, not comfort
Is India growing, or borrowing its way there?
The stock market tracks the giants, but these pings track desperation.
The great repricing of everything
For nearly a decade, we've operated in a minimal friction, growth-first economy. This week, the costs have become impossible to ignore.
When the war reaches your kitchen
It's an interesting reminder of how global events move through an economy.